The scenes in Villiers's classic The W ar with Cape Horn tell one much of the humanity of these men and their ability not just as hard drivers but as leaders of men. secure, hove- to like a bird with its head under its wing as the breaking seas roared by, and rejoiced in the homey atmosphere, with little Sto rmalong, smalles t of rhe boys, already asleep. The Conrad made her way up the Atlantic to New York, and there Villiers so ld her, to pay her bills. H e knew he couldn't keep her, and he persuaded Huntington H artfo rd, who at first had wanted only to buy the figurehead, to take on the whole ship . Villiers returned to England , now his home, and too k up an intense study of Arabian dhows . H e wanted to learn the ways of these traditional sailing ships before they va nished and thei r memory was los t. H e embarked fo r Arabia, where he joined the great Kuwaiti boom (double-ended dhow) Triumph ofRighteousness. T he vessel and her people fascinated him, but nearly killed him when an obj ect falling from aloft knocked him unconscious for days . N o one aboard had kept track of what day ir was, so when his eyes began to function and he was able to stagger about the decks again, he didn't know how many days he'd been out. Villiers gained the co nfidence of the nakhodas (captains), sailors and merchants of Kuwait and wro te in detail of their ships, how they built and sailed them , their stories, beliefs and details of their fi nances. H e'd planned to sail fo r three years, but after Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, he wo und up his affairs and returned to England. World War II was precipitated by Hider's invasion of Poland. Britain had a treaty to defend Poland which Hider did not thi nk she wo uld ho nor- bur the English people, ever reluctant to resrage the horrors of World War I just 20 years before, had slowly changed in the late 1930s, a rime increasingly oppressed by Hider's threats, growing armaments and takeover of adjoining countries, and darkened by his hideous persecution of all Jews in his territo ry. C hamberlai n was co mpelled by rising sentiment in the H ouse of Commons to declare war rather than hold another conference to satisfy Hider's cl aims. The Stature of Man W inston Churchill, newly appointed to the offi ce he'd held in World War I as First Lord of the Admiralty, rose to set forth the case for war on the day it was declared: It is a wa r, viewed in its inherent quali ty, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man. Villiers responded to this call and went to sea as a naval officer. The looming approach of war had been one of the reasons he wanted to do the Conrad voyage as early as 1934. H ider was then only a year in power, but fascism and co mmunism were already eating away at the fa bric of European freedoms. W hen the United States came into the war fo llowing the Japanese attack on Pearl H arbor on 7 D ecember 194 1, Villiers was sent across to bring a convoy of landing craft to England for the Anglo-American invasions ofl taly and then France which led to the liberation of Europe. After the fall of Germany he too k his little armada of small landing craft, called LC is, to Burma and Singapore in the war against Japan. Others vital to the heritage of seafaring had similar records. O ne was Karl Kortum , the yo ung man with stars in his eyes who had signed on for the voyage of the Kaiulani, rhe last American square rigger to ro und Cape H orn-and it was off Cape H orn that Ko rtum and the gang heard of Pearl H arbor, thro ugh a crewman's portable radio, hooked up to a wire antenna strung up the
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mainmast. H e went on to serve in the Pacific war after the Army took over the Kaiulani in Australia, retu rning to the US after the war to fo und the San Francisco Maritime M useum, and later, the National Maritime Historical Society. Irving Johnson and his wife Elecra were in H awaii when the Japanese bombers struck Pearl H arbor. Seeing the column of thick, black smoke rising from the flaming ships in Bat tleship Row, they knew what had happened and grieved fo r human ity. Johnson, who had been sailing aro und the world with yo ung people in crew in his famous Yankee, served in the US Navy, surveying the enemy-held waters which he knew as only a sailing ship mas ter can know them . After the war he and Exy co ntinued their wo rld voyaging in a seco nd Yankee, and then sailed Euro pean waters in a third, before re tiring to Irvi ng's fami ly farm up rhe Connecticut River. From there he and Exy put fo rth the good word on sail training and wo rked with struggling organizations, among them our National Maritime Histo rical Society, to bring fres h life to the seafaring heritage. After the war Villiers went on to docume nt the long struggle with Cape H orn as he'd known it in his time, interviewing captains like Captain M ierhe of the five- mas ted bark Potosi, living in reti rement in Chile. Villiers discussed with him, captain to captain, how the great German ships did so well in the early 1900s and on into the 1920s in the war wi th Cape H orn . T hat meeting, and other scenes in Villiers 's classic The War with Cape Horn, tells one much of th e humani ty of these men and their ability not just as hard drivers bur as leaders of men . Never one to sit writing about these things when there were discoveries to be made in rhe heritage of sail and causes to be sup po rted, Villi ers also sailed with rhe Spanish schooners that fis hed the Grand Banks, rhe las t of the oldest No rth Atlantic trade under sail, from which the barkentine Gazela survives today in Philadelphia. He sailed with the Portuguese in their old sail training ship Sagres, now preserved in Germany under her original name Rickmer Rickmers. H e sailed a reproduction of the Mayflower of 1620 from England to Plimoth Plantatio n, Massachusetts, rediscovering in a gale how the rail stern acted like a sail in helping the ship lie hove-to . Always practical, always with his own hand on the helm or in some ship's work like sewing sails (which he did with the fa natical precision which had annoyed his Arab shi pmates), he also wo rked with Karl Kortum to support rhe ships of San Francisco , and with the late, great ship resto rer Ken Reynard to restore the Star ofIndia in San Diego . His dream to build and sail a replica of Cook's Endeavour was not achieved in his life time, but the superb reproduction that sails the seas today was p ractically built in his memory. And he wo rked ti relessly with Jako b Isbrandtsen, my wife Norma and me to advance the restoration of the Cape H orner Wavertree in New York's So uth Street. O n one visit, after his strenuous appearances on our behalf, in which he showed slides of his explorations of all the he ritage of sail, while setting forth his experience of what it all meant to the peo ple involved and to humani ty, I insisted he take a lay day and go with my son To mmy and me to visit his old ship Joseph Conrad installed at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. He was reluctant to go, but finally consented. H e warned Tommy as we wen t up the ship's gangplank, "Watch our for falling blocks, Tom ." A previous visit to rhe ship had not proved rewarding; she was not then kept up in shipshape fas hion, and so did not and could not truly represent the
SEA HISTORY 91, WINTER 1999-2000